2002
Tag: M Night Shyamalan
video review : The Sixth Sense
If I saw dead people “everywhere” all the time, I think I’d eventually get used to it, at least to the point where it doesn’t scare me anymore. Not nine-year-old Cole Sear. They still scare him and he’s been seeing them all his life. It’s a secret he keeps to himself, so when he reacts to them, alive people think he’s crazy. I thought he was too until I started to see the ghosts for myself. I wasn’t scared though. I was more dumbfounded than anything else. How, I wondered, are these ghosts wearing clothes?
My snide thoughts were more entertaining than this movie; a slow-paced psychological thriller that doesn’t really thrill until the end. It’s a twist ending if there ever was such a thing; one I was surprised thus impressed by. It almost made me want to watch the movie all over again to see how they pulled it off, but I wouldn’t subject myself to that. It’s too boring for too long. As the kid says to the psychologist while he’s trying to tell him a bedtime story, “You have to add some twists and stuff.”
my rating : 2 of 5
1999
video review : Signs
M Night Shyamalan uses the psyche of his audience against them. He uses what’s not on screen to pump fear into their minds, suggestive music, lighting and camera angles to build a sense of dread where there is nothing to fear. The monster in Signs, a movie that drags along at a slow methodical pace, doesn’t reveal itself till the end. Even then, it’s mostly hidden in shadowy TV-screen reflections.
The thing is, it isn’t scary. It’s somewhat suspenseful; the ending, in which the Hess family borders all the windows and doors of their Philadelphia home and hides in the basement, reminds me of the classic Night Of The Living Dead; but, despite a plot that has reptilian space aliens traveling to Earth from presumably light years away, it wastes too much of its time not really going anywhere.
my rating : 3 of 5
2002